Agricultural balers have been used for years to consolidate and package crop material to facilitate the storage and handling of the crop material for later use. Usually, a mower-conditioner cuts and conditions the crop material for windrow drying in the sun. When the cut crop material is properly dried, a baler, for example a round baler, travels along the windrows to pick up the crop material and form it into cylindrically-shaped round bales. When a predetermined size is achieved, the cylindrically-shaped round bale is wrapped and bound by wrapping material, such as net wrapping, plastic wrapping, and/or wire. After the round bale is wrapped, the back of the baler, or tailgate, opens and the wrapped bale is discharged.
Conventional balers use wrapping material that is stored as cylindrical tubes known as wrapping material rolls. A wrapping material roll is typically mounted on a baler by a mount or arm that is capable of allowing the wrapping material roll to rotate. Wrapping material from the roll is then fed into a mechanism that applies the material to a completed bale, and is then cut to separate the wrapped bale from the rest of the material.
The conventional methods have several drawbacks. First, the wrapping material rolls are heavy, typically over 100 pounds, and are thus difficult to maneuver by an operator. Second, the cylindrical nature of the rolls makes storage of the wrapping material difficult on a baler, limiting the total amount of wrapping material available, and causing more frequent downtime to reload wrapping material. Third, feeding the wrapping material off of the roll requires power, since the inertia of the roll must be overcome to pull wrapping material off of it every time a new bale needs to be wrapped. Therefor what is needed is a wrapping system that overcomes these drawbacks in order to increase baling efficiency.